I'm mostly known for writing electro and aggressive bangery house music. But before I started making electro, and while I was making electro, this sort of gushy, make-the-ravers-cry sort of sentimentality is so important to me.
— Porter Robinson
If I could turn it on like a faucet then I think it would be kind of unearned. I feel like you need to struggle a little bit to make anything good.
The warmest place I've ever been is my home here in Chapel Hill. It's an oasis of comfort and joy for me.
I spend a good deal of time doing, for anxiety what's known as exposure therapy where basically you're supposed to confront things that cause you anxiety and learn to tolerate. It's all about learning to tolerate discomfort rather that avoiding anything that might make you feel uncomfortable.
My most successful song was 'Language' and I think partly because it's a nice, dancey record, but I'll see people cry in the audience to that song, and that's so much more interesting to me than making someone just jump up and down.
I like to shower for a really long time; that's a distraction-free zone for me.
I had a lot of self-doubt when I started. And I still do. But I had a lot of the wrong kind of self-doubt when I first started making music and first started to tour. I think I was a little bit deferential.
If you trust your instincts and it doesn't turn out right, OK. But if you compromise and defer to what somebody else is telling you and it doesn't work out, that feeling gnaws at me.
When I'm writing good music and I'm caffeinated, I attribute all my success to the coffee, get really sentimental about the EDM scene and tweet a lot.
My studio was lo-fi by necessity; I was fourteen with no reliable income.
I wanted to do music that was a little more sentimental, emotional, and serene - completely different from the party music I was doing.
I love the idea of web design that maximises expressiveness over functionality.
Yeah, I've always wondered what it would be like to make music that's not nostalgic at all, and it's really, really hard for me to imagine.
It might be interesting to people to say that I would do something with Taylor Swift, but the reality is, it's so not on my list of things to do.
It was more than enough, but I'm completely satisfied that 'Virtual Self' got nominated for the Grammy. That is a complete victory for the project in my mind and anything else is just bonus.
I want my music to be really big. I have no interest in DIY Brooklyn; I don't want to be a small indie band.
Electronic music was this super cool thing to me my whole life.
Being like 14 and 15 years old, listening to trance music in my home, I just had this fantasy of going to these big clubs and going to these massives, and just hearing this gorgeous, delicate music.
There's a really high emphasis on having good taste in my household and having nuanced opinions. We're always critically analyzing stuff.
I'm releasing more music as Virtual Self, I'm definitely going to be touring Virtual Self.
I think it's important to form a connection with an audience to a point, but I also feel like there's an instructive element to what you're doing. And I think it's necessary to challenge people.
One thing that scares me a little bit is that I want people to like my music, but I think a lot of what I like about my own music are these references to things that people don't share nostalgia with me on.
I think not having come from the DJ world was an asset to me at first because I didn't have some of the habits other DJs had, and I think in a way that set me apart.
The DJ role, it's never been a big thing for me.
I really am in love with the idea of an artistic signature.
Writing music while caffeinated produces some interesting results. The stimulation basically amplifies my music-production-dependent bi-polarity.
If an artist I liked disowned songs that meant a lot to me, I would be pretty hurt by that.
I'm so grateful for archives like Wayback Machine, who for 15 years have been creating snapshots of almost the entire web.
The anonymity of the internet has been completely abandoned - everything's so tied to your identity and sense of self now. It's hard for me to see that changing, but that's why I wrote a love letter to something that once was.
There are a lot of people who wonder why Japan is a pretty consistent influence in my music, and I think it's because the reason I started writing - my intro to electronic music was Japanese music.
I just want the truth about it, because if the reality is that electronic music festivals are significantly more dangerous than other festivals, then something should be done about it, and that warrants conversation.
I wanted there to be something to fill the space and to catch the listener's ear, but I didn't want there to be any 'Virtual Self' songs that had a clearly defined vocal with lyrics and top line. If you do hear any lyrics, it's just your brain filling in the gap, because those moments are just various syllables combined.
My original goal was to get into the Top 100. I listened to every song in the Top 100 every day. I knew them all - this is where the gods reside.
The one thing you can't control is what comes after what you release.
Language' is, I think, my favorite song that I've ever written.
My relationship with my brothers... it's almost weird. We've never fought, we finish each other's sentences, but not in a creepy way. We talk about the things that we love and share music with each other.
I'm never going to stop writing music as Porter Robinson and I see 'Virtual Self' as more of a tangent.
And I'm interested in writing music that takes risks. My point is that maybe the term EDM is pinned on me and my buddies, but maybe it'll be less so if I experiment.
EDM is very functional. It's meant to make people jump up and down and go crazy and it's real good at that. I just think in terms of expression, it's very very limiting.
I came into having an artist's career in this very sheepish and directionless way. It's hard to explain, but I was 18 years old and I was ready to go to college; that was the next step for me. Then suddenly I had a song that blew up... and I had this artist's career and I was on tour with these big names and I didn't know what I was doing.
It's hard to regret making the choice that you think is right.
Toplines usually suck. I'll send a song to a band or artist whose entire body of work I love and I'll ask them to do a vocal for one of my songs and I'll get it back and I'll hate it so much. It might have to do with my possessiveness over my music.
When I'm making sentimental trancey fluffiness, I like to have some equally saccharine aromas filling the room.
I still play the songs I declared noncanonical.
As much as early 2000s aesthetics are something I was pining for and very much love, I would occasionally struggle to find one singular image or one singular site that summed up all of my memories really well.
The thing that makes me want to proceed and finish a song is when it really touches me and makes me feel something.
I think Skrillex working with Justin Bieber - some immature people will have a huge problem with that; I'm just saying I don't care.
I've got a hundred thousand things on my mind that are taking precedence over trying to make pop collaborations.
Star Wars Galaxies' didn't ever explain itself to you. It was horribly broken; it was glitchy in several significant ways. It was just this vast, expansive, beautiful universe with all these crazy idiosyncrasies.
I was trying to write new music, but there was nothing I was reacting against. It turned out 'Worlds' itself became something for me to to resist.
